I read something recently that gave me food for thought. An alternative has to be 10x better for people to switch; and the core experience is what convinces people, not cool extra features.
I don't know how universally applicable it is, but I wonder how Mastodon stacks up in that. Personally I think it's 10x better, but is it really? Or more importantly, are we communicating clearly that it is?
@Gargron I think instance selection is a huge roadblock.
Keep laughing, but: dynamically generated instances as a default sign up, including a dynamically generated cute name and logo. Once the person count hits Dunbar's number, a new instance automatically spins up.
Pooling new people together gives them the opportunity to meet each other and create their own culture.
Of course this would just be a default option for someone who doesn't already have a specific instance in mind.
@mhu2141ai @Gargron yes, centralization is a point of concern. Maybe the new auto-generated instances could expire and force people elsewhere after a time limit.
My concern is that the onboarding process is simply too arduous for all but elite or highly motivated people.
@kai I apologize for the tone -- it's just that things looking to maximize user count / "engagement" have been universally terrible IME and selecting for people who make a baseline effort helps. If people aren't thinking about who moderates their instance, their experience will probably end up suffering for it anyway, and -everyone- loses if you have a flood of people who don't know wtf they're doing
@mhu2141ai no need to apologize; I'm no social media philosopher or anything.
I just remember a reddit april fools' day where you got placed in a chatroom with one other person and then the rooms got joined so it was 4 people and that kept happening and you could vote when to stop growing the community. It was really interesting. I think a similar experiment would be interesting with activitypub.
@kai Yeah, as an experiment and not a general purpose feature that sounds fun
@mhu2141ai it solves other onboarding problems though 😉
@kai I'll reiterate: anyone who can't spend 10-15 minutes selecting an instance deserves 0 onboarding, and onboarding them would likely be a detriment
@elomatreb @kai I really do not think this is half as difficult as you're making it
@elomatreb @mhu2141ai @kai for me personally it was very easy.
I signed up for m.s and once i stayed too long there I knew that I need to move unto a smaller instance.
I chose chaos.social because lots of cool nerds were there. You need to use Mastodon in order to get a sense of what each instance is about. What sort of people come from the instance and what is discussed there.
@saxnot @elomatreb @kai Yeah I mean, that's another thing. It's not that onerous to move once you know some people and have a sense of what instances are out there
@saxnot @mhu2141ai @elomatreb I already suggested a time limit lol.
@mhu2141ai @elomatreb @kai it's okay to chill on the biggest node for the first couple of months. Even if m.s blocks large parts of the fediverse network.
Maybe there should be some sort of timer in the sense of "okay you're on m.s for 6 months now. It's time to move on [link to instances.social ; link to hosting provider ; link which lists the instances of your followers]